9/14/24
Ultra-nationalists in the United States face a unique dilemma, namely that the Second World War is a core part of America's historical mythology.
This is an awkward fact for extreme rightists to confront, because their instinct is always to aggrandize the state, to worship it, and to sanitize and glorify its past--but if a central part of American history includes total war against the very same forces that ultra-nationalists seek to cultivate, one can see how that might be a tough circle for them to square.
The way rightists tend to deal with this conundrum is through outright revisionism. By questioning the official narrative of WWII, they attempt to underplay both the importance of the War to our national self-understanding, and the centrality of fascist aggression to the conflict’s catastrophic nature.
Was the War really necessary? Would the Holocaust have happened if not for Allied missteps? Didn't the West carpetbomb German cities? And what about Fat Man and Little Boy?
The ultra-nationalist project absolutely needs these kinds of questions to be asked, otherwise their vision for the future is too easily discredited. Fear of fascism is so ingrained in American minds that the far-right must obfuscate on the question of who the true villains of the 20th century were. This is necessary for their views to sneak into the mainstream.
As a result, discussions about the history of WWII are almost never actually discussions about history at all. They are political conversations with political aims.
No single event has been so closely studied by mankind as the Second World War, which ended 80 years ago as I write this. What are the odds that anyone has anything new to say about it? Pretty much zero.
So if you encounter a figure who claims to have novel insights about “what really happened”, your default assumption should be that they’re up to no good.
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